Missing locations in identify screen that show up in the Explore screen

[kyle_eaton_photography]

Platform: Laptop and Android, Chrome

App version number, if a mobile app issue:

Browser, if a website issue: Vivaldi running Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/314454100 (the place name I’m copying from)

Description and Screenshots of what you are seeing:

The same location name, the city of San Rafael, shows up on observations, and can be searched for in the Explore screen, but there’s no shape file for the city it seems, the result for the city name is for a tiny portion of it. So I guess that’s two issues?

Explore page results for the same search (copy pasted from the observation I originally saw it on)

The resulting area doesn’t cover the city as a whole and seems to be mislabeled.

I discovered this because I became aware of a large number of planted redwood trees on a school campus that I wanted to sort through in the Identify screen, but when searching in Identify, the school name and even city name didn’t come up with any results.

[cthawley]

I don’t think this is a bug, just a function of how location searches work differently in iNat (google matching vs. iNat places) based on which search box you are using, see:

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/place-names-dont-show-up-in-explore-tab-but-do-in-top-search-bar/10037

and other forum threads.

[kyle_eaton_photography]

Hmm, but if you type the same location into Google Maps, it correctly highlights the city borders, which iNat does not (doesn’t find the location, or the border it draws is a location within the city, not the city itself).

[bouteloua]

iNaturalist doesn’t import borders from Google Maps.

[kyle_eaton_photography]

Okay, so that explains why the borders are subpar, and I read all of the replies in that forum post, but I’m still unclear on why the Identify search has fewer locations. Is that intentional design?

[bouteloua]

Explore has search options for both Google locations and iNat Places. Identify searches only iNat Places.

[pisum]

@bouteloua

Explore has search options for both Google locations and iNat Places

this provides a little more detail: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/trying-to-search-for-place-savannah-georgia-comes-up-with-place-savannah-national-wildlife-refuge/39519/4